Buffalo Tim

The child is father to the dad.

Father’s Day has always been a difficult time for me. It isn’t that I don’t have a father; rather, it’s that, every year at about this time, from the sky descends a giant fixed template of American Dad-dom, which, alas, fits my father very poorly. We’ve never been to a ballgame together. We’ve never tossed the old pill around in the back yard. We’ve never had a couple of beers, or even one beer. We’ve never been hunting or fishing or camping. We’ve never worked on cars, or done anything else involving a tool kit. He has never offered me homespun advice that was no less true because it took the form of familiar bromides. He is not, in truth, even a regular guy. Although he is a member of the Greatest Generation, he spent the Second World War stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines in an encryption unit, which doesn’t fit the model of paternal martial valor preferred by rueful unmilitary baby-boom sons.

As father and son, we would do things like drive around the environs of New Orleans on Sundays, carrying a list that he had somehow obtained of the trees with the greatest girths, and double-check that the girths were actually what the list said they were, which often involved sneaking into people’s back yards. Whatever category that fell into, most of the rest of what we did together fell into it, too. So you can see why Father’s Day for me is what Valentine’s Day is for someone who’s just been jilted.

Tim Russert, the host of “Meet the Press,” and one of the three or four most lordly figures in Washington journalism, doesn’t have this problem. He’s celebrating Father’s Day this year by publishing a fond memoir called “Big Russ & Me” (Miramax; $22.95), which presents his own dad as a holiday paragon. As no one who watches “Meet the Press” can avoid knowing, Russert, who is fifty-four, grew up in Buffalo, New York, in a blue-collar Irish-Catholic enclave on the south side of town. His father, now eighty, was a high-school dropout, a veteran whose home away from home was the American Legion hall, and a family man so devoted that he worked two jobs, as a foreman in the city sanitation department and as a newspaper deliveryman, in order to keep (lots of) food on the table and send his four children to parochial school. He is a fount of plainspoken wisdom, who, to this day, provides Russert with guidance that is just as unerring in the realm of political journalism as it was when directed at Tim’s summer job collecting garbage.

Russert absolutely rules Sunday-morning Washington television journalism: he’s crushing his competitors—Bob Schieffer, of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and George Stephanopoulos, of ABC’s “This Week”—in the Nielsen ratings. When there’s a monstrous “get” to be got, such as, back in February, an interview with President Bush in the Oval Office, Russert obtains it. His hour-long interviews with the Democratic Presidential candidates have ranked just behind the primaries this year as crucial tests for them. Since Bob Woodward publishes a book only every year or two, week in and week out Russert probably holds the distinction of being the journalist whose work Washington talks about most obsessively. The leading figures in both Washington journalism and television journalism are more than just solitary seekers and tellers of truth about the holders of governmental power. Russert performs a journalistic function on “Meet the Press” in the sense that he peppers officials with questions, but even if you don’t live in Washington it’s obvious that he’s a bigger deal than most of his guests. His role is that of a luminous fixed star in political space, around whom other bodies must orient themselves.

“Big Russ & Me” is not so much a self-examination, or even a dad-examination—very little in it could be honestly described as interesting—as it is a highly effective extension of the Russert brand. The book is written with Bill Novak, the celebrity ghostwriter, who is credited as “full partner.” The brand wouldn’t be so successful if it weren’t genuinely appealing, and Russert in these pages is characteristically forthright, unpretentious, respectful, and values-laden. And Big Russ himself functions less as a vivid character in a book than as an enhancer of his son’s mystique. Big Russ, it turns out, is a name conferred by Tim Russert on his father, not something that his friends called him. The senior Russert’s real name is—Tim Russert. At least nominally, he’s an invention of his son. Big Russ fades out somewhat as the book goes on, but every appearance, while presented as being illustrative of his good qualities (no filial ambivalence here!), literarily performs the function of making Tim look good, by reassuring us that he’s permanently connected to a father lode of realness.

As Russert gets older and more successful—as when he first appears on “Meet the Press,” as a panelist, in 1990—Big Russ regularly pops up to reiterate his teachings. “ ‘Just be yourself,’ Big Russ said. ‘Pretend you’re talking to me. Don’t get too fancy. Don’t talk that Washington talk. You’ve got to talk so people can understand you. Ask questions that my buddies at the post would want to know about.’ ” In particular, Big Russ displays a magic touch by taking perilous moments at which his son might reveal himself to have become just another privileged jerk and turning them into pure Buffalo gold. Russert goes to dinner at Spago, in Los Angeles, with Maria Shriver, and Big Russ comes along and tries to order a Genessee or a Labatt’s. Russert offers Big Russ the fancy car of his choice as a birthday present, and Big Russ picks a Ford Crown Victoria. Earlier, Russert’s decision not to fight in Vietnam doesn’t put him in the category of contemptible baby boomers, because he is merely taking Big Russ’s advice. (“For this war, right now, if you have a chance to get a college education, take it.”) Big Russ is a kind of personal amulet guaranteeing that Russert will always retain his common touch, a matter not lacking in relevance to Russert’s career: “Big Russ is the least expensive and most accurate focus group around, which is why I call him every Monday morning for his reaction to Sunday’s show.”

Whether or not at Big Russ’s direction, Russert has reinvented the Sunday-morning interview format. His signature moves are relentlessly aggressive questioning and, related to that, frequently cutting away to a screen that displays a quotation, sometimes from the guest (in which case it’s often something that contradicts the guest’s present position), sometimes from a political rival or a journalist (in which case it’s often an attack to which Russert asks the guest to respond). The text blocks, and Russert’s own questions, which seem to be written down on a piece of paper that he brings onto the set, bespeak both careful preparation, if not by Russert himself then at least by his staff, and a subtle elevation in the status of the Sunday-morning news-talk host. Having done so much homework confers on Russert a dutiful-schoolboy aspect, and he always maintains a direct, unpreening manner. Still, his method puts him in quite a different role from that of “Meet the Press” hosts and panelists in the old days, who questioned officials respectfully, as if to communicate that their function was merely to extract what a Washington big shot wanted to say. Russert goes in for the kill. Here he is interrogating Al Gore in the summer of 2000, following the display of one of his gotcha quotes, this one showing the younger Gore expressing ambivalence about legal abortion:

russert: When do you think life begins?

gore: I favor the Roe vs. Wade approach, but let me just say, Tim, I did—

russert: Which is what? When does life begin?

gore: Let me just say, I did change my position on the issue of federal funding and I changed it because I came to understand more from women—women think about this differently than men.

russert: But you were calling fetuses innocent human life, and now you don’t believe life begins at conception. I’m just trying to find out, when do you believe life begins?

Or, in the same year, as the moderator of a debate between Hillary Clinton and her opponent in the New York Senate race, Rick Lazio, after showing a clip of Clinton’s deny-all appearance on the “Today” show just after the Lewinsky scandal broke: “Do you regret misleading the American people? And, secondly, in that same interview, you said that those who were criticizing the President were part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Amongst those eventually criticizing the President was Joe Lieberman. Would you now apologize for branding people as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy?” Clinton seemed for just a moment to lose hold of an experienced politician’s repertoire of controlled emotional responses; she looked genuinely upset.

Russert wouldn’t be such a big star, though, if he crossed the line into nastiness. He usually takes the dangerous edge off his hostile questions by presenting them as being merely requests for a response to something someone else has said, and he has an instinct for when to pull back from charged moments and return to tough-but-respectful. He jokes with the guest or with the audience—not on every show but often enough for it to stick in our minds—usually about his love of the Buffalo Bills, thereby striking a note not so much of humor as of reassurance and familiarity. Ritualized official combat followed by masculine joshing is deeply embedded in Washington culture—it signals that membership in a community of important people trumps the enmity that the system forces them to act out. Bringing up sports not only lightens the tone, it implies an explicit analogy to the conduct of politics. The Gore interview in 2000 ended with this Beckettian exchange about the Bills’ defeat in that year’s playoffs by the Tennessee Titans:

russert: Go, Bills. Forward pass. Go, Bills.

gore: Bring it on in.

russert: Go, Bills.

gore: Here are the ribs, Tim.

russert: Go, Bills. Go, Bills. Forward pass.

One could, if pressed, tease out a few hints of particularity in Big Russ. His Greatest Generation credentials aren’t in perfect order. He was a parachute-packer, not a combat soldier; he never made a jump. His wartime brush with death came when, on a flight to a British resort for R. and R., a pilot foolishly tried to land in heavy fog and crashed, killing several soldier passengers. The best Russert can do by way of paternal material hardship is to evoke the overcrowded conditions on the Queen Mary, which was Big Russ’s troopship: “When I think about the crossing, I can’t imagine how men of my own generation would have fared on board.” Two-thirds of the way into “Big Russ & Me,” Russert’s mother, a spectre flitting obscurely through these pages, and Big Russ suddenly split up, after thirty years of marriage. Russert neither offers an explanation nor tries to pretty it up—and Big Russ’s advice dispensary is soon open for business again—but it’s a sign of some deviation from the script.

To the extent that Big Russ has any non-platitudinous beliefs, they are a preoccupation with job security—the private economy as we now understand it doesn’t occupy much space on his mental map—and a deep reverence for authority. When a minor transgression gets Russert in trouble with one of the priests at his high school, he protests his innocence to Big Russ. No dice: “His exact words were, ‘If Father said you did wrong, you done wrong.’ Case closed. No appeal.” Russert says his favorite movie is “Cool Hand Luke,” but he’s anything but a rebel. Toward officialdom he is always respectful, and toward officialdom so high as to border on celebrity he is starstruck. Together, Big Russ and the youthful Russert plan a way of making contact with John F. Kennedy during a Presidential visit to Buffalo. The carefully laid plan works. “I touched him! I touched him!” Russert exultantly reports to his dad; “Finally, a Russert has met a president of the United States,” a gratified Big Russ says. (It’s interesting that both Bill Clinton and John Kerry also had their own versions of this life-shaping youthful brief encounter with Kennedy.) During the Cuban missile crisis, in the world Big Russ made, Russert approvingly recalls, “nobody even considered being critical of the president during a time of crisis.”

The adult Russert, on NBC business, gets an audience with the Pope. “I was awestruck,” he reports. “There I was, a former altar boy from South Buffalo in the presence of the Vicar of Christ.” The first thing he says is “Bless me, Father.” A meeting that Russert recounts at greater length, and with even more fondness if less reverence, was with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney in the White House in the spring of 2001, when he is invited, along with his son Luke, to a luncheon for members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The folks back home may not know that it’s an almost universal experience for top-rank Washington journalists to attend official social occasions at the White House, and to treasure the experience, never mind that their onscreen relationship with the Administration is neutral or adversarial. Those at the highest rank can get a private moment in the Oval Office. Bush approaches Luke and asks him to come on back; he pulls in Cheney; they spend a few gleaming minutes talking sports. Afterward, Russert induces Luke to write a thank-you note, in which he says he hopes he can make it to both the Hall of Fame and the Oval Office one day. “The next time I saw the president, I told him about my son’s ambitious plans,” Russert tells us. “His response was beautiful: ‘Never get between a boy and his dreams.’ ”

Just after the September 11th attacks, Russert bags an interview at Camp David with Cheney. Beforehand, naturally, he calls Big Russ for advice, and it is “Just let him talk. Let him help get us through this.” Bingo: “Dad was so right. Without his advice, I would have focused mostly on the future, on our response to terrorism.” Instead, though we now know that planning for the war in Iraq was already under way, he had Cheney reminisce about 9/11. On the drive home, he checks back in with Big Russ. “That was great. Thank you,” he says. A year later, with war plainly on the horizon, Russert gets another interview with Cheney. The Vice-President’s manner—gruff, plainspoken, and perpetually alert to the world’s manifold perils—could have been custom-designed to have a positive effect on Big Russ’s son. I’m going to put an excerpt from the interview up on the screen, just to show you the distinctly respectful tone that Cheney brings out in Russert:

cheney: This just isn’t a guy who’s now back trying once again to build nuclear weapons. It’s the fact that we’ve also seen him in these other areas, in chemicals, but also especially in biological weapons, increase his capacity to produce and deliver these weapons upon, upon his enemies.

russert: But if he ever did that, would we not wipe him off the face of the Earth?

cheney: Who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim? We don’t know.

russert: Could it have been Saddam?

cheney: I don’t know. I don’t know who did it. I’m not here today to speculate on or to suggest that he did. My point is that it’s the nature of terrorist attacks of these unconventional warfare methods, that it’s very hard sometimes to identify who’s responsible.

Russert was the first person in his family to go to college. Then he got a law degree and became a political aide, first to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and then to Mario Cuomo, who now look as if they were the last of the great urban white-ethnic Democratic politicians. At one point, he tells us, he came close to working for Leonard Garment, the Republican Washington lawyer-macher. He started in journalism relatively late, and initially as an aide to the president of NBC News, not as a reporter or a producer. After General Electric bought NBC, Jack Welch, G.E.’s chairman, personally appointed Russert Washington bureau chief, and it was a couple of years after that that he became a panelist on “Meet the Press” and, later, the host, replacing Garrick Utley. It wasn’t until David Brinkley retired as the host of “This Week,” in 1996, that Russert assumed the throne of political-interview television.

The career path that Russert followed is actually quite common in his corner of journalism. The real-American altar boy turned political aide turned TV news-talk host is a capacious category, which includes, besides Russert, Stephanopoulos, Pat Buchanan, and Chris Matthews, among others—several of whom have published books that combine memoir, patriotic sentiment, and personal advice. In the abstract, there is a line separating news and entertainment, and journalism and politics. In real life, in Russert’s field, one has to play both a character whom audiences want to invite into their homes and one who is deeply a part of the high-level business of Washington. To be voluble and bright but also an authority figure, to be morally aware but in the end practical, to subject power to the test without undermining it, to question assertively within a conventional frame—that’s the job description. Russert fulfills it better than anybody else, and the title character he has created in his book makes for an excellent guide to the rules of this highly particular game. ♦

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